erpellan

The object syntax example looks very like what is already possible in Kotlin: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.html

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If someone showed you a picture of a morbidly obese person and ask you what you thought they ate, what would your first thought be? I'm fairly sure it wouldn't be 'they need to cut down on the vegetables'.

How many super overweight people do you know who eat all vegetables and whole grains?

There are always outliers but the cliche western 'bad diet' is too much meat, fat, processed carbs and dairy.

I'm a reluctant part-time vegetarian - pizza is my spirit animal. But I cannot ignore the cognitive dissonance I experience with a lot of the 'bargaining' style diets being pushed. My animal brain really wants to believe there is a healthy diet that lets me pile on the bacon and chorizo and still lose weight but the evidence just doesn't support it.

Fresh vegetables are great but yes, mostly water. Beans, rice, lentils, grains (in dry form) cost less per kg than chicken, don't need refrigeration and will make many more meals.

Something like 70% of farming is growing crops to feed animals which we then eat. Meat is an incredibly inefficient way to turn sunlight and water into calories. If we all switched away from meat and ate mostly plants instead we’d have more than enough without needing such intensive farming methods. More seriously than that though, current methods are actively destructive to the soil - the longer we farm so intensively the less viable farmland we will have. Does that sound sustainable?

Meanwhile the pesticide manufacturers are following the cigarette company playbook and busily funding bullshit research and top notch PR to deflect blame. This is what happens. We blanket our fields and their surroundings with chemicals specifically designed to highly efficiently kill insects and are surprised when insects die in droves. But sure, blame people living in cities.

It can be structured as an income tax that starts out negative. Everyone of working age is paid the UBI, which is designed to act as the safety net. This frees up a ton of overhead as means-testing, benefit fraud, etc. all goes away.

Then when you get a job, the UBI starts to reduce, at a rate LESS than the money you are earning. So if you're paid $1000 monthly UBI, and get a $1000 job, it might reduce UBI by $500. So you're always better off working. You'd probably want a sliding scale so maybe the first couple of hundred only reduces your UBI by 0.20 per dollar, or whatever. It can be structured so the net tax take for the government is the same. Yes this probably means people earning more than say $100,000 pay a bit more in tax. I'm okay with that.

The mistake we all make is thinking the market includes us, the patients. If there is anything resembling a 'normal' (price discovery) market, it's between hospitals and other care providers and the government. The entity with the funds can foster healthy competition between the entities with the product/service. If you need medical attention, you need medical attention. A treated patient is not the customer, they are the output.

That is nowhere close to how ruthlessly they crushed competitors well before that. Microsoft are why you've probably never heard of Supercalc, Lotus/123 and WordPerfect. All superior products in the 80s and 90s, all crushed by MS strong-arm tactics of forcing PC manufacturers to sell machines with Windows and Office pre-installed.

They even destroyed companies they weren't even competing with, but thought they _might_ want to later! All MS needed to do was issue a vague press release that they were working on a competitor to [some successful software product] and all the customers would hold off on purchases until the original (successful) company went bankrupt. Many times MS never ever released anything, leaving everyone worse off.

So yeah. They seem nicer now, but they climbed over a lot of dead companies to get here.

Yes, and what does that buy you? Instead of a single deployable unit that owns the database, there are many deployable units, none of which can own the database. That doesn't seem like an improvement.

Or nationalize the insurance companies and set up a national health service.

The really stupid part is that keeping the delivery workers safe is ALSO keeping the wealthy consumers (and owners of those businesses) safe!

If you're holed up at home and SARS-CoV-2 strolls in your front door on the outside of your toilet paper then you might as well have just taken the risk and gone shopping yourself! Such painful short-sightedness.

If the application is stateless (all state lives in the DB) you can run as many copies of the monolith as required behind a load balancer.

Aircraft toilets always sound pretty damn loud to me. And their main reason to exist on planes is the lack of available water. Pretty sure that is not an aircraft carrier’s constraint.

Thanks! That makes a lot of sense. Certainly more than the pundits currently lambasting the UK health services for their strategy of flattening the curve. The current argument against being (I kid you not) that the health authorities are somehow stupid enough to think that immunity can be passed between individuals like the virus itself.

I appreciate you taking the time to correct me.

Herd immunity until now referred to immunisation (ie vaccination). It is not at all clear that allowing people to get infected and recover will achieve the same result.

A car has brakes. An engine breaks down.

Apart from that I agree. We forgot the ‘enlightened’ self interest part of capitalism. My wealth means nothing if the planet has to die for me to get it.

The thing is, oil and gas are super useful raw materials for everything from clothes to furniture, fertilisers and pharmaceuticals. Setting it on fire to keep ourselves warm will look like insanity in 100 years time.

A lot of financial firms use an integer of the smallest indivisible unit of currency wherever possible (stripe is one). This has the handy property that string and numeric representations are identical so no risk of being flipped into scientific notation by some layer. That happens more often than you’d think.

FX is a different world. Spot FX trading systems are fully automated and compute rates to 5 DP. That was 15 years ago, I don’t know if it’s more now. Large Yen amounts can come worryingly close to the limits of precision.

I once watched a colleague trying to persuade a roomful of people to stop using floats. The demo showed what happens to 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1. The answer was not 0.3. I’m not sure they believed him. Some of them are probably still writing software for your bank!

Boring. The word is boring. Boring companies whose stock prices do nothing for 30 years but gently drift up and down with the market (or not), steadily yielding 5% dividends year after year. Usually they sell things like toilet paper, soap, electricity or other boring everyday things. When it comes to long term investing, boring is good.

When I invest it’s usually because I think “I like this dividend yield.”

I can buy, forget and auto-reinvest the dividends. Stock price swings are not particularly interesting if you never plan to sell.

The scientific publishing industry is a racket. It’s defending a pricing model that was steep when all journals had to be typeset and printed. Now it’s inexcusable.

All Open Access does is shift the cost to the authors of the paper (usually as an explicit portion of the funding grant). The publishers still get paid! They just can’t keep charging over and over for the same PDF. Of course they’re going to whine and moan.

Phrased another way, given the figures of 40 for cars and 117 for planes, unless everyone on a flight all travelled to the airport together in no more than 3 cars there’s a higher risk of death on the way to the airport than on the flight itself.

That’s because when a car crashes it’s not typically travelling at 500mph with 250 people on board.

Yes, NASA was funded to collect the actual data until Trump arrived. The facts don’t care if you don’t like them and they don’t go away if you cover your eyes like a child and pretend they’re not there.

- Phone generates public/private key pair.

- Phone registers public key with backend during signup.

- Phone generates ticket signed with private key.

- Backend checks signed ticket against registered public key to charge customer.

Fraud is still possible but limited to individual customer accounts.

4xx errors are no better or worse than 5xx. They just mean different things.

Generally, 4xx errors means 'Client screwed up'. There's probably no point sending this message again, it isn't going to work until something is fixed. That might mean it will work if, for example, the account is funded or card unlocked. But something needs to be done on behalf of the client.

5xx errors mean 'Server screwed up'. It probably _is_ worth having another attempt at sending the request. Maybe it was a temporary glitch, or maybe a new release of the server has to happen. Regardless, there was probably nothing inherently wrong with the actual request.

I owned a fingerworks keyboard in 2003. The multi touch and gestures were amazing. And it was physically painful to type on. Try touch typing on a solid surface for any length of time. Fingertip bruises are no fun. The company mysteriously vanished shortly after announcing an after market multitouch keyboard for the iBook...

The same OCD tendencies that are conducive to technical expertise can also be aimed at other aspects of life. I go through occasional boughts of dressing smarter, just for the satisfaction. And the nice shoes. Life's too short for boring shoes.

Excel was considerably inferior to Supercalc for many years, only winning because it was almost impossible to buy a pc without windows and office preinstalled for a chunk of the 90s

That's fine, and extremely common! I know some accomplished speakers and more than one of them have shaking hands for the first few minutes of a talk. They're just used to it. Some people get over their fear of public speaking, others get over their fear of the fear.